The White House is requiring the federal government to cut their 24,000 websites down by half in…
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Currently, the US spends $80 billion on information technology to run its numerous services and websites, making it the biggest buyer of IT in the world. But, in a bid to make the computing more efficient, many of these services will be consolidating and moving into the cloud. Sharing the computing load by performing tasks remotely and in tandem saves both processing power and money, saving $5 billion a year. And closing down the data centers, apart from it being better on the environment, will save $3 billion a year in energy costs.

And we're already ahead of schedule, on track to close down 373 center by 2012.

Again, this is part of a larger governmental effort to reduce spending that goes into redundant services. While the number of data centers in the country has ballooned over the last decade, officials are starting to agree that we simply don't need that many, even when more services are pushed online in the future. Looks like progress to me. [NYT, Image Credit: Eimantas Buzas/Shutterstock]